Ukraine’s drone development means no region of Russia can feel safe, a Russian official says. Ukraine informally opens remaining three clusters in the EU membership bid. Ukraine targets Moscow with drones for three days in a row.
Ukraine’s drone development means no region of Russia can feel safe, Russian official says
Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu told a meeting of officials in the city of Yekaterinburg on Tuesday that the pace and development of Ukrainian drone production meant that no Russian region was safe from attack.
“Until recently, the Ural was out of reach for aerial strikes from the territory of Ukraine, but today it is already under a direct threat,” he said.
The region hosts companies of the defense industrial base, energy and chemical companies, large oil and gas extraction sites — “everything that’s at the base of economic security and the state’s defense potential,” Shoigu said.
The Ural region also has a wide and dense transport infrastructure, including large railway lines and nodes as well as federal highways, he added.
“If they are put out of service, not only it can cause considerable economic damage, but also destabilize the life of large agglomerations and disrupt supply chains, including ones that are critical to the logistics of the special military operation,” Shoigu said.
Companies of the defense industrial base deep inside Russia are frequent targets of Ukrainian drone attacks. The range of the strikes is constantly growing.
Ukraine has cards to play thanks to its military and defense production, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi told Irish journalist Caolan Robertson in an interview released last week, in a reference to a U.S. request for Ukraine to help the allies counter Iranian drones in the Middle East.
Ukraine informally opens remaining three clusters in EU membership bid
The European Commission handed Ukraine draft negotiating positions for three clusters under the frontloading mechanism, which allows technical progress in EU accession talks, Ukrainian news site European Pravda said Tuesday. The paragraphs below are quoted from the article.
As part of continued talks on Ukraine’s EU accession at the technical level (the frontloading mechanism), Ukraine received draft conditions from the European Commission on the morning of Tuesday 17 March in Brussels for closing clusters No. 3 Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth, No. 4 Green Agenda and Sustainable Connectivity, and No. 5 Resources, Agriculture and Cohesion Policy.
As a result, Ukraine now has the necessary conditions to negotiate across all six clusters required for joining the European Union.
Taras Kachka, Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration, thanked the Danish and Cypriot presidencies as well as the European Commission for launching the frontloading mechanism to enable Ukraine to continue accession talks at the technical level.
“We are taking this extremely seriously, and we really appreciate the support of the European Commission in this,” he said.
Kachka added that Ukraine “really appreciates the involvement of the Commission in implementing all these benchmarks”.
“This step is a really revolutionary step in a very European way, so that’s in line with current accession methodology but also in line with the current reality that we cannot waste any day for the accession of Ukraine to the European Union… So that’s why we really appreciate that the European Union applies its creativity while maintaining the rules,” Kachka said.
Kachka added that “this is also a good signal for Ukraine on how to continue reforms during war”.
“We did a lot during wartime for the last four years. We’re particularly successful in anti-corruption reforms and judiciary reforms. We have a really well-operating anti-corruption framework. We have a lot of judges that are selected by the bodies that have been created with the support of international experts, and there is a big trust in their work. We will continue with the same pace,” he said.
On 17 March a similar procedure will also take place in Brussels for Moldova, represented by Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration Cristina Gherasimov.
Frontloading will allow Ukraine to complete all technical and legislative work required for EU membership without waiting for Hungary to lift its objections and allow the formal opening of negotiating clusters.
The “technical opening” of the final three negotiating clusters with Ukraine and Moldova had initially been planned on the sidelines of an informal EU General Affairs Council meeting in Cyprus on 2-3 March but was postponed until May due to the war in the Middle East.
On 11 December in Lviv, the EU announced the launch of a new format of technical talks with Ukraine that are not subject to a Hungarian veto at an informal meeting of the General Affairs Council of the European Union.
Ukraine targets Moscow with drones for three days in a row
Ukrainian drones targeted Moscow overnight on Tuesday, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin said. Russian air defenses shot down 40 drones, he said. The Russian capital comes under drone attack for the third night in a row.
The Russian defense ministry said the country’s defenses shot down 218 drones between Monday night and Tuesday morning.
Sobyanin said around 250 drones had been destroyed between Saturday and Monday on approaches to Moscow.